Grumpy Comedy Review – The Goode Family

Bizarro King of the Hill

Mike Judge’s latest animated effort, The Goode Family, can’t escape comparisons to its animated family sitcom contemporaries (there are approximately one million of them now) and I’m not sure we need another one. Especially one that seems this outdated.

It has some clever ideas – like the adopted white African American son and the vegan dog starved for animal flesh – but watching its premiere episode feels like I’ve been transported back to the mid 90s when many of the ideas and concepts mocked in the show really were considered kind of unusual.

Wind power? Hybrid cars? Global warming? Whole Foods?! What wacky and novel concepts! Or, uh, they used to be. Now? Not so much…

Okay, well, Whole Foods is over-expensive hippie (hipster?) bullshit and the premiere episode’s supermarket scene was the best part – full of clever bits like the giant sign of “good” and “bad” foods that can’t make up its mind and the loudspeaker singling out the one SUV driver in the entire store.

Otherwise? It’s a bizarro version of King of the Hill with an extremely bright color palette and jokes that barely got a rise out of me. The difference is that King of the Hill gives you the feeling Mike Judge lived around those kinds of characters for years…

Watching The Goode Family feels like he just heard of liberals and their concerns from hearsay. Like, boy those hippies sure like Al Gore, don’t they? And they’re never sure what blacks like to be called these days! Aren’t vegans just wackyyy?! It’s all familiar ground.

The wife-mother of the Goode family, Helen, recalls Peggy Hill, a horrible, overbearing husk of a woman who does everything to improve herself and her family only to stand out as acceptable in the eyes of others. Except she’s like a self-aware version – a Peggy upgrade.

At one point she asks, “Why is it so hard to be good?” and you can’t help but slap your forehead at how awful she is. The other members of the family fare slightly better with white African son Ubuntu as the most likable if only for his dim-witted nature, and dad Gerald and daughter Bliss are bland foils to Helen’s neurotic behavior.

And then there’s the dog who just kind of looks and acts like the tortured, titular canine from Family Dog. Remember that show? Yeah, me neither.

I don’t know. It’s always tough to judge new shows based on their first half-hour episode. Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill started out rocky too before they went on to become two of the better animated shows ever produced.

Based on The Goode Family’s lackluster premiere outing – and its home at the finicky liberal-friendly, Disney-owned ABC network (which canceled Clerks, an animated show that proved its worth about five minutes in) – I can’t hold my hopes too high. But if it manages to live longer than a month and actually shows some improvement, like making me laugh for example, I’d gladly eat crow.

So long as it’s organic flaxseed oil crow and not one of those processed, factory-made crows.

***Tim Magus is Julius Bloop’s film reviewer. Visit his website – Grump Factory***

Note From Bloop: You can watch the episode on ABC’s website. This is a link. It’s worth a look!